At one level I agree with you, that if self upvoting didn't pay any rewards it might help, but only for a few minutes until everyone switched over to second fake accounts for voting.
Now I'm just raising this next point to emphasise that there is also another side to this - most of us are very small and upvoting our own comments has bugger all effect on the reward pool, but it does get our comments seen when otherwise they mostly wouldn't be.
I can only speak for myself, but I upvote ALL my own comments at 10% and have done for my past 1600 comments. I would still do this if there was no reward, because it's all about placement.
My highest payout this year was for a comment rather than a post, and yes I had self upvoted it to the top of the stack before anyone else voted for it!
While some people complain about hardfork 19, I know my own post payouts have gone up 10 fold on average since that change, so I like it a lot.
We have whales upvoting each other to the tune of millions and nobody is saying boo because they will get their arses handed to them on a plate, but if minnows self upvote they are supposed to feel guilty about it?
I like my own comments so I upvote them. If I didn't like them I wouldn't post them.
There is some freaky shit for you :)
All the best, I'm not disagreeing with you here, just saying there is another side to this, and I know I'm not alone with this viewpoint.
